Boo-Ya

4/7: Eigengrau

The ventilation brimming is the only sound fanning through the respite of the strange moment.

For a moment, none of them moves. Then Thomas wiggles his hand and Maven tries to take it again.

The digits are greyish between his own, a cage of long fingers. A blue vein on his wrist pulses visible, no such luck on the other hand he holds.

"How does this even work?"

"Who cares?" Thomas shrugs.

Maven frowns. "I care."

"I haven't been touched, for, legit, three years, please just hold my hand."

It doesn't feel like skin. It's a strange in-between of tingling hot and cold. He turns their hands from one side to the other and runs his other hand over the compliant, soft texture. It gives in slowly.
As if Thomas' skin could melt any moment, the longer he pushes. Like wax.

The sensation tingles over Maven's spine with the laughter it coaxes out.

"That tickles!" Thomas chuckles. "Can you believe it? You tickle me!"

The enthusiasm of a touch starved person is contagious, and with a strange infection of the heat and chills, it turns into a weird pace of fingers poking or hands holding.

"That's nice."

"It is nice."

For a while they just stand there, with grey dims dusk drawing circles and breezes blowing wind walls and pirouettes against stones.

The longer they hold hands, the weaker the sun gets, and the stronger something else coils in tension like the fists he makes and loosens.

"Want to make out?"

"Are you serious?" He says that way too loud. The hope for absence and emptiness around him keeps his head up but his ears stay alert.

"I am a dead boy in a closet," Thomas states the obvious. His eyes are black pits even if the rest of him smiles. "I have been alone for years running around the house yelling at people. I will be very sad if I thought we had a thing and we don't have a thing now. Like, I don't imagine we have a thing? You wanna?"

What is a thing and what does it entail?

But then again. This is already out of hand. This is his little secret. And even if he tells himself he doesn't want to.

He does want to. He watched the videos on repeat again and again wondering how it would be to fill the gap of a collarbone and throat with his fingers. How the hair gets pulled back, how he could push against everything he knows and has gathered in a pile about Thomas.

It's not enough but it's a start, he thought, and this may just be enough, just a little more, just something to fill the starvation for the stranger on the image and the laughing person in his bedroom.

The kiss is stilted and rigid, fitting for the circumstances both of them are in. It lands stiff, and then, just like the rest of the waxy strange feeling, it slowly melts away.

It isn't as if Maven has much expertise in kissing someone.

The other participant of the kiss does better with a grin, one hand softly resting at one side of Maven's face.

After a moment, one of them needs oxygen.

Even with oxygen, everything slightly turns in some panicked sickly moment.

"That was nice."

"Yeah, yeah," the impish grin and the dark eyes still keep themselves trailed on Maven. "It was. But practice makes perfect they say, right?"